Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
2025-12-11 00:06:01
2025-12-10 20:06:03
What’s in a like? That which we call a heart by any other name would be a retweet. (I am so sorry, mostly to my college Shakespeare professor, but really to everyone reading this.) On Instagram, in any event, the things we like perchance tell us more about ourselves than we might readily admit. For instance, I recently liked a video posted by Tao Elder Tianhe—no idea—in which he explains the “Human Feng Shui Formatio”: women who love lying down are not lazy but, rather, are “recharging, attracting luck, and keeping the whole family’s energy balanced.” He does not speak about whether watching a steady stream of “Southern Charm” while lying down has any effect on household vibes, but that’s O.K.: I’ve already moved on to liking multiple posts about decorating your Christmas tree with shrimp.
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What I’ve gleaned about you all—New Yorker readers—by reviewing the cartoons that you liked most on Instagram this year is that you’re really going through something. You reacted strongly to satire about health care, ICE raids, the Epstein files, and death rays. Which, fair. You also enjoyed cartoons that take place in therapists’ offices, which gives me hope that you’re working through some of this politically induced malaise (hopefully for only a small co-pay). And, sometimes, perhaps while reclining and recharging, you gave in to the simple pleasure of jokes about hot dogs, real dogs, varieties of tea, and Easter candy. For the sake of your own sanity, as well as the nation’s energy, which is certainly out of whack, please: stay horizontal, and keep scrolling.
2025-12-10 20:06:03
In the beginning of Ha Jin’s new novel, “Looking for Tank Man,” a sophomore at Harvard seems to be on the verge of throwing her life away. Pei Lulu is the pride of her divorced parents. Her life in Boston is supported by her mother’s salary from a job at Tsinghua University and her father’s business of sculpting Buddhas and dragons for overseas clients. That Lulu has managed to study abroad—at Harvard, no less—is already an achievement. But she’s also particularly dedicated, even among her extraordinary peers. When her wealthy friend Rachel vacations in Newport or goes skiing in Vermont, Lulu is content to stay on campus, reading books in the library. There’s just one problem: she is a history major. All governments have their preferred versions of the past, but some are more totalizing than others. For a young Chinese person, interest in the wrong subject can seriously screw things up.
The year is 2008. Many Chinese people, including those pursuing an education abroad, still carry the self-image of an earnest underdog with much to learn and much to prove. (Lulu couldn’t have conceived that a Presidential decree might one day threaten her spot at Harvard, or question her eligibility for a student visa.) But has there ever been a simple time to be Chinese? A pivotal moment for Lulu arrives when she decides to join a crowd welcoming the visiting Chinese Premier. She feels an obligation to do so “because the delegates, even though we disliked them as officials, were from our motherland.” The mood is jubilant, with hundreds of miniature red flags and smiling young faces, except for one slender middle-aged woman. She is unaccompanied, but she holds a sign suggesting that she isn’t alone: “We Won’t Forget the Tiananmen Square Massacre!” The crowd is repulsed by her presence. A group of students disavow her message (“Nobody believes you!”), question her motive (“Why help Americans demonize our country like this?”), and call her names (“Bitch!” “Cunt!” “Loser!”). Lulu doesn’t participate and worries for the woman’s safety. Still, she uses the first-person plural in describing the crowd’s reaction. We intervene, she narrates, in the same way that we feel obligated to welcome the delegates from the motherland. The little flags, at first a sign of confidence in national identity, now seem to have turned into something else.
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I caught myself flinching at this scene, not only for the naked, charged confrontation, but also for Ha Jin’s choice to present it as a focal point. Jin left China in 1985 for a graduate program at Brandeis University. The brutal crackdown against student protesters in Tiananmen Square came four years later. In the aftermath, Jin’s decision to publicly support the students’ democratic values apparently cost him the ability to visit his home country. It’s impossible not to see him in the figure of the lonesome protester; he’s likely faced some of the same insults, the same accusations that he’s dredging up the past. “The massacre, if there’d been one,” Lulu thinks to herself, “had taken place almost two decades before, and I was amazed that the woman was still bent on making a protest about it today.” For the author to choose this history as a subject is to insist on examining a long-festering wound of his generation.
Before “Looking for Tank Man,” Jin had published twenty titles in America. Some were poetry, some were essays, but most were works of fiction that dealt with well-educated Chinese who were unhappy with their lives. At first, these characters were situated in the China that Jin had grown up in. Then, starting with Nan Wu in “A Free Life” (2007), they began to migrate to the United States. Nan—like Jin, a graduate student in America who’s shocked by the news from Tiananmen—was followed by a series of characters, in the story collection “A Good Fall” (2009), who are caught between two worlds, navigating hope and disillusionment. And the protagonists in “The Boat Rocker” (2016) and “A Song Everlasting” (2021) are thriving professionals—an expat journalist known for exposés of the Chinese government, a popular opera singer—whose failures to obey the state obstruct their path to an undisturbed, conventionally successful life.
The drama of these stories, in which insiders become outsiders, is evident; displacement promises profound confusion, conflict, discovery, and entanglement. So it goes with Lulu, who, after her encounter with the protester, becomes obsessed with the Tiananmen Square massacre, and enrolls in a course on the subject. It isn’t an easy class. Seeing photos and documents of crushed people, and visiting blood-drenched objects retrieved from the site and preserved in the basement of a Harvard library, Lulu is no longer in doubt of the facts. She turns her investigation toward the students’ intentions. She finds that they were peaceful and law-abiding, advocating for dialogue instead of subverting the political system. (After a portrait of Mao Zedong was vandalized, some even turned in the culprits to the authorities.) Lulu is especially drawn to the famous photograph of the “Tank Man,” who is seen from behind as he impedes a column of armored cars from advancing. Something about this image thrusts her feelings into contradiction. To her staunch nationalist friends, she fiercely defends its place as a global symbol of resistance; at the same time, she can’t stomach a mullet-sporting white guy who displays the photo prominently on his cabinet, as if it’s a poster of a rock star.
A decisive turn arrives when Lulu travels back to China to visit her ailing grandfather, who tells her a secret that’s been withheld for decades: her parents were involved in the protests during the spring of 1989. Her father had worked on the famous “Goddess of Democracy” statue, and her mother was among the first hunger strikers. Once Lulu starts asking questions, her parents don’t put up much of a fight. They still believe in the ideals of freedom and democracy, they say, but they’ve grown deeply skeptical of the reform they once demanded, and of their own sense of agency at the time. Her father feels he was maddened by rage. Her mother feels that she and her peers were “meant to be sacrificed.” Upon learning that Lulu is writing a thesis on what happened, though, she hands over her diary. “I hope it will be useful for your studies,” she says. Lulu’s father’s face twitches, but he encourages her: “You’ve got to do what you have to do. To be controlled by fear is not a way to live.”
As graduation approaches, Lulu ponders her future. On the one hand, she sees the appeal of finding a job in Beijing to be close to her mother, who raised her alone. On the other, she feels she has unfinished business in America, where, ironically, she’s best able to understand the particular history of her home. She is surrounded by adults who counsel her to be pragmatic, but there is little consensus on what that entails. Her dad feels obligated to make money for his new family—an Audi-driving young wife and twin boys preparing to eventually study in America—but wishes he had more integrity as an artist. Lulu’s mom regrets not pursuing a graduate education. She gives her daughter mixed instructions: Lulu ought to secure a good man as soon as possible, but should also stay self-sufficient, never beholden to money, power, or love.
Lulu navigates all this with a delicate maturity, managing her parents’ anxiety without necessarily surrendering to it. She moves to New York for a Ph.D. program at Columbia, which appears to be a haven of multicultural acceptance and intellectual inquiry. Her adviser is a charming cultural historian who used to perform standup in Mandarin; Lulu, whose dissertation is on Tiananmen, takes full advantage of the dedicated East Asian library. This environment stands in stark contrast to her experience at Tsinghua University, where she uses her mother’s I.D. to explore the library catalogue, which hosts a rich collection of translated Western classics but has scant publications on her specialty. When she awkwardly initiates conversations about the “Tank Man,” she ends up with a member of the campus police. The officer turns out to be an acquaintance of her mother’s, so he lets her go, but the message is clear: if she isn’t careful, a precious child of the motherland can easily become an enemy of the state.
I found Lulu’s bold expedition in Beijing incredible. What kind of sensible person would do this? Sometimes, the novel’s need to cause tension feels at odds with the nature of government-enforced silence, but a novel can’t represent everything; Jin wants to investigate, to connect. Lulu herself is an amusing, if strange, hybrid of an old Chinese soul and an American millennial. She pledges her commitment to her mother by saying, “If I need to carry you around on my back, I’ll do that.” The same Lulu turns around and adoringly calls her close friend a slut. When she figures out that she was conceived in the immediate aftermath of the bloody crackdown, she exclaims, “I am a fucking Tiananmen baby!”
In a way, all the Chinese students who have roamed U.S. campuses in the past two decades are children of Tiananmen. They saw China’s rise as a modern superpower, but they also grew up in the shadow of 1989’s unspeakable fear and internalized guilt. When I visit Beijing from time to time, I occasionally pass by Chang’an Avenue, which runs between the stately Tiananmen gate and the square that bears its name. The street is lined by tall, graceful lamps comically laden with surveillance cameras. I’m always swept away by the site’s crosscurrents of meaning: there’s the sheer and grandiose beauty of the architecture, which has witnessed the fall of dynasties and the attempt, by the People’s Republic, to build an egalitarian country, and there’s the inescapable fact that this place is a symbol of authoritarian control.
To embrace the former makes one a righteous heir; to recognize the latter risks one being disowned. Lulu chooses to hold both possibilities close: she doesn’t accept looking away from atrocities, but she doesn’t throw her life away, either. Her own idea of pragmatism is to live an “independent and fulfilled life.” It would be wrong to forget such history, but it would be wrong, too, to imagine that it could be contained in a thesis, or even in one’s memory. After all, in cautiously phrased news stories, in disappeared citizens, in halting phrases and unfinished conversations, the spectre of Tiananmen lives on. ♦
2025-12-10 20:06:02
In general, I am a fan of the new. New people? Love to meet them! New experiences? Love to have them! New films and albums and books? All reasons to get up in the morning! But, when it comes to things to buy and collect and wear, I’ve never really been a modern girl. I’ve always loved retro objects—things that seem to hold within themselves an ancient story, things that might possibly have been enchanted by a bog witch. One of my favorite childhood toys was my grandmother’s creaky beige typewriter; I spent more time clacking about on the thing than I did playing with any of my dolls du jour. In my teens, I developed a passion for thrifting that has never really abated; I still prefer to wear a dress from fifty years ago to one made yesterday, all things being equal. Now I feel like my time has finally come, because buying secondhand has never been more popular. A 2025 “Recommerce Report,” by the online marketplace OfferUp, found that ninety-three per cent of U.S. consumers bought at least one used item in the past year, and nineteen per cent of them were making their first-ever vintage purchase. Members of Gen Z are especially passionate about shopping secondhand. According to The Business of Fashion, young people, raised on internet sleuthing, are turning away from new luxury items, knowing that they can hunt down used goods of equal or higher quality instead. They’re “not tuning out of fashion,” the report states. “They’re interrogating it.”
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There are surely many other causes for this—economic anxiety, climate anxiety, cultural nostalgia. Perhaps it’s that we’re sick of being marketed at online with firehose force. (How many times can Instagram try to sell me futuristic L.E.D. masks and cutting-edge eyeliner? Answer: infinity.) Perhaps it has something to do with the ambient dread that people feel about the rise of A.I.—and about the glee that technocrats seem to take in introducing slick products that could end up replacing us or bankrupting us or both, depending on which way the bubble pops. Perhaps it has something to do with the over-all mood of this grimly tumultuous year, and the way that it feels discordant, or even distasteful, to grab for the latest, greatest, shiniest thingamabob that promises to fix it all. For all of these reasons, I feel more drawn than ever to items that are secondhand or—if they must be new—emulate the craftsmanship and quality of an earlier time. In this spirit, I present you with a list of old-fashioned gifts for either your loved ones or yourself. But let’s be honest: so much of the pleasure of buying used is the thrill of the hunt, so my hope is that this list will be more of a jumping-off point. May a few of my vintage rabbit holes send you off on searches of your own.
When people ask me about getting started buying vintage, I often direct them toward glassware. There are so many beautiful used glasses out there, and they are often quite affordable, and having a few beautiful pieces sitting around makes more of a difference than you would think. My life was improved when I began drinking seltzer not out of the can but out of a vintage milk-glass goblet, the pale opaque green of pistachio gelato. Other vessels that have caught my eye include these celestial stunners ($89 for a set of four); Italian pink frosted wineglasses, perfect for rosé ($101 for six); opaline juice glasses the color of limoncello ($128 for four); mid-century milk-glass goblets ($82 for half a dozen); nineteen-fifties cut-glass Nick and Noras ($40 for six); thirties “lily pad” coupes ($46 for two); a fifties silvery lowball set ($60 for five) with a Studio 54 aesthetic; and a sixties Martini set ($158) in the original box, complete with a tall pitcher and a glass swizzlestick. I have also had my eye on these pewter Jefferson cups ($45 each)—they aren’t vintage, per se, but they are based on cups that Thomas Jefferson himself designed, with a local silversmith, in 1810. Buy them for your uncle who can’t stop talking about the new Ken Burns film on the American Revolution.
Ludditism is cool now, have you heard? So is having no followers on social media. The point is, we are all sick of our slop-filled phones, so why not give something that can help your recipients escape theirs? Enter the classic alarm clock: a tried-and-tested way to rise the old-fashioned way. For secondhand options, eBay and Etsy are your friends. This Spartus quartz clock ($15) is as nineties as an episode of “Friends.” There’s a prim and proper Westclox Baby Ben ($40); a German metal “travel alarm clock” ($276); a charming, if a bit battered, nineteen-fifties clock with an illustrated face ($80); a futuristic Italian clock from the seventies ($145) that looks like a piece of Elsa Peretti jewelry; a retro iMac clock for the Y2K nostalgic ($40); and this beauty with a dancing ballerina trapped inside ($95). For new clocks with an old feel, I am partial to the Westclox Moon Beam ($58), a zippy little clock first introduced in 1952 that feels right out of a mid-century diner. (Most Moon Beams you can find these days are reproductions, but you can still hunt down a bakelite original for $45 on eBay). The Penco Flip-style Clock ($290) is a bit pricey, but unmatched if you want that classic fluttery motion when the numbers turn. The Braun BC22 Alarm Clock ($69) is sold at the MOMA store for a reason; it is a perfect little chunker. This Arne Jacobsen table clock ($139) feels like it belongs in the apartment of a Nora Ephron heroine, and this Kikkerland model ($23) has a decidedly Bauhaus vibe.
Bedding tastes come and go—right now, if TikTok is any indication, people are into something called the “Ralph Lauren Christmas” aesthetic, which involves covering one’s bed in hunter-green flannel. But quilts and woven blankets are eternal. They contain within their threads so many connections—to matrilineage, to inherited knowledge, to tradition that persists regardless of what’s in style. As for the truly old stuff, I recommend the Etsy shop CrazyQuiltVintage, where you can find gems like this nineteen-twenties antique rose-wreath quilt ($487) and a circa-1900 Indiana “snail trail” quilt ($359). I’m also a fan of ShyTiger, a one-woman shop run out of Canada that specializes in upcycling vintage materials like old quilts into adorable garments and accessories such as this tote bag ($119) and this tempting shearling-collared duster coat ($704). But I’ve also admired many new specimens from Amish Country Lanes, a site that allows Amish quilt-makers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere to sell their wares online, and from Helping Hands Quilt Shop, out of Berlin, Ohio, which features the quilting work of local Amish and Mennonite craftspeople. (How beautiful is this $1600 Starry Night one?) At 8th Gen, which focusses on the work of Native American artisans, there are several warm wool blankets to buy, based on motifs that have been passed down through generations; this “family floral” blanket ($405), by the Shoshone-Bannock artist Kira Murillo, is particularly gorgeous.
If evening gloves are back, can fans be far behind? They’re functional, sure—there will be hot days, and you may want help feeling less hot—but they’re also just frilly and silly and look great tacked onto a wall. There are bushels of vintage ones to be found online, but I recommend checking out Farina Sternke’s shop, MadAboutFans, in particular. Sternke’s fan obsession grew out of childhood trips to East German castles, where historical outfits were perfectly preserved. Today, she stocks an ever-changing selection of the most elegant antique fans I’ve seen. Right now, there’s this fluffy Art Deco-era number covered in ostrich feathers ($232), and a hand-painted Victorian fan with a base of mother-of-pearl ($180). Or perhaps you’d rather wear your fan as a brooch ($65)? Or as a pendant charm, with nineteen-sixties Italian-giallo flair ($67)? Or as Fritz Lang-esque clip-on studs ($20)? For a high-quality new option, there is Khukhu’s Napoli red hand fan ($146). It is designed to evoke “rows of beach umbrellas, swirling tarantellas, red dresses and cornetto ice-creams,” which is another way to say it looks like summer. In these cold winter months, it can act as a sort of harbinger of brighter days to come. (That, or you can use it to disguise your visage at a masquerade ball. I don’t know your life!)
If you are ever feeling blue in New York City and you need to get someone a gift, there is no quicker way to kill two birds than to drop by Economy Candy, on Rivington Street, which boasts the distinction of being New York’s oldest continuously operating sweets shop. Economy Candy is what I like to call a dino-store—a shop in the city which has managed, somehow, to weather the decades and remain open for business, and is now, because of sheer tenacity, and perhaps a favorable real-estate deal, the last of its kind. Economy is also one of the only places in New York that I believe to be worthy of a gift card; usually, a gift card says, “I didn’t know what to get,” but here it says, “Go play!” Of course, we can’t all teleport to downtown Manhattan, but as an alternative I’d suggest putting together your own Economy-style gift box full of old-timey sweets. Perhaps a two-pack of classic Belgian Guylian seashells ($35) or some Cella’s cherries ($8). Or maybe a six-pack of C. Howard’s Violet mints ($9), some Goo Goo Clusters ($2 each), a pound of black-licorice cats ($8), and some Sifers Valomilk cups ($93 for a twenty-four-pack). In general, the internet has resurfaced nearly every nostalgic confection one could hope for. So, go ahead, give a pound of peanut-butter fudge from Chatham Candy Manor ($20), or two pounds of Shriver’s taffy ($30), or a tin of Peppermint Divinity from the Vermont Country Store ($17), or a tub of Dubble Bubble ($19). The worst thing that could happen is that someone will smile kindly and say, “How sweet.”
Scented candles have become the laughingstock of gift culture, dismissed as lazily impersonal and, if you pair the wrong scent with the wrong person, a noxious liability. I politely dissent. Nobody is kicking the zesty Loewe tomato-leaves candle ($130) or the herbaceous Trudon Abd El Kader candle ($135) or the earthy Tatine forest-floor candle ($45) or the sensuous Diptyque Narguilé candle ($78) out of bed. But, to change things up, how about giving the candlelighter in your life some old-school candle accessories? The British writer Dolly Alderton, who has impeccable taste, suggested that I track down candlesnuffers, and I am here to oblige. You wouldn’t think that having a little gizmo to put out flames would be so useful, but, once you snuff, you never go back—you’ll feel as glamorous as Kim Novak in “Bell, Book and Candle.” There are many secondhand gems to be found for a song: this bronze deer ($25); this combo candle stand and snuffer ($24), from the sixties; and this haunted Victorian girl rendered in pewter ($19). If you prefer a new one, Schoolhouse has a cute, portly model ($99) that would look quite cheery on a tabletop. Or how about this one ($39) that resembles a wee duck? Or this much larger duck ($86)? Or this one ($31) that looks like a bluebell cup? I recommend bundling a snuffer with a lighter for a weightier gift—this Art Deco-inspired lipstick lighter from Edie Parker ($85) is a dream. You can also never go wrong with a refurbished antique lighter; Elegant Lighters is my go-to source.
Sometimes you just want to dress like you’re on contract for M-G-M and you won’t come out of your trailer until they give you more lines. If this resonates, I cannot recommend highly enough the work of an Etsy seller called Velvet Zephyr, which specializes in exquisite handmade old-fashioned dressing gowns. Last year, I ordered this green velvet robe ($315) with faux-fur trim, and it has made me happy every single day since it arrived. I am also partial to this pale-pink design ($357). For something a bit more “Life of a Showgirl,” a designer who goes by LucyAmberLingerie makes marabou robes, like this pink showstopper ($153), by hand; and FolxAtelier, out of London, sells glorious chiffon creations like this cascading lavender robe ($550). A dressing gown calls for elegant house slippers; I recommend these chocolate velvet wedges ($425) from the British shoe designer Olivia Morris, or these dainty cotton-candy-colored slip-ons ($130) from Patricia Green.
The Spirograph, a children’s drawing toy in which you poke a pen through a series of corrugated circles to create swirling geometric designs, was recently reissued on the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary. I bought this set ($20) at the MOMA store, won over by the sleek tin case and the promise of mindless doodling. I have since spent many hours with it; the looping concentric circles remind me a bit of Ruth Asawa’s pleasantly globular sculptures, soothing in their streamlined intricacy. I plan to give a set to every kid I know. Meanwhile, the classic Chinese tile game mah-jongg is also having a moment (according to Harper’s Bazaar, “all the cool kids” are playing it now). You can get into it with stylish starter sets from Oh My Mahjong (from $640 for a mat, tiles, and a carrying case) and the Mahjong Line ($495 for a set of pink tiles). Rummikub, another tile game, invented in the nineteen-forties, is also making a comeback—grab a handsome Rummikub starter set ($195) and get playing.
Writing by hand is back in vogue; more and more people are keeping paper-and-pen journals, and professors, wary of ChatGPT, are now giving students handwritten assignments. For my money, a very good gift for someone interested in exploring old-fashioned scribbling is a Calligraphy starter kit ($95-$125) from the Postman’s Knock (which also teaches excellent online courses). For an added flourish, you could throw in a quill-and-ink set ($33). The TWSBI Eco fountain pen ($39) is an ideal first pen for those getting into the fountain-pen game; pair it with an Inkvent advent calendar ($110) for colors galore. For vintage pens, you can do no better than the Fountain Pen Hospital, which has been serving New Yorkers since 1946. For a more experiential gift, you could give an online cursive-writing course ($289), which will, according to the instructors, “help you improve your penmanship and keep the art of cursive alive.” Also, if you know someone who is looking to write more letters by hand, here’s a shameless plug for the illustrated coffee-table book on handwritten correspondence that I published earlier this year; it even comes with tear-out stationery.
If someone offered to get me any scent-centric gift I wanted this year, I would request a trip to the Osmotheque, in Versailles, the world’s largest perfume archive, which houses centuries of classic fragrance formulas. But there are simpler ways to sniff out bygone fragrances. This Astier de Villatte three-perfume set ($315), developed by the master French nose Dominique Ropion, contains three vials of re-created historic fragrances—from Egypt, ancient Rome, and nineteenth-century France—whose formulas were rediscovered by the scent historian Annick Le Guérant. The perfumer Marissa Zappas creates modern perfumes that take their cues from classical scents. Her discovery set ($75) includes two of my favorite vintage-leaning perfumes: La Divina, a heady rose fragrance named for the first Roman courtesan, and Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive!, a champagne-and-oakmoss scent inspired by Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” But why overthink it? A great throwback gift for a scent lover is a bottle of Badedas Vital Bath ($16), an herbaceous, emerald-green goo from Germany that has been a European beauty secret for decades. And, for all you bathers, I’ll offer a little parting gift of my own: a playlist of classic torch songs to listen to while getting pruny.
2025-12-10 01:06:01
2025-12-09 20:06:02
Events now move at a pace so exhausting that it’s hard to remember that 2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster: large portions of the nation’s second-biggest city, Los Angeles, burned in a firestorm that lasted days, after a record-dry autumn. A succession of such tragedies followed—for instance, the killer floods along the Guadalupe River, in Texas, where atmospheric moisture off an overheated Gulf of Mexico had hit record levels. Or Hurricane Melissa, where wind gusts reached two hundred and fifty-two miles per hour, faster than ever measured in a tropical cyclone at sea, thanks to the superheated waters of the Caribbean. The same day that Melissa hit Jamaica, a storm dropped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in twenty-four hours, the second-biggest deluge in recorded history, and the start of a truly sodden autumn across Southeast Asia which has left more than a thousand people dead.
The year 2025 seems nearly certain to enter the books tied with 2023 as the second-hottest ever measured, trailing only 2024. Since both of those earlier years were influenced by a strong El Niño event, this one will have the dubious distinction of being the hottest without such an extraneous force. This is apparently what business as usual looks like for a planetary climate carrying our atmosphere’s current load of carbon dioxide and methane. On the three-year moving average by which we measure such things, the Earth is now inching ever-closer to the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in temperature set out as a goal to avoid just a decade ago at the Paris climate talks. And diplomatic events in 2025 did little to ease fears about what’s coming. The thirtieth Conference of the Parties (COP) global climate talks in Belem, Brazil—which no one from the Trump Administration attended—just concluded, and the Times described the final document in unusually straightforward terms as “a victory for oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia.”
None of this should shock anyone. International climate diplomacy, since its high-water mark at Paris, in 2015, has been besieged by the fossil-fuel industry and its proxy governments, which now include, of course, the United States, historically the Earth’s chief producer of CO2. I’m going to quote at some length from the speech the American President delivered to a silent U.N. General Assembly in September, because it sums up perfectly both his own imperviousness to fact and the assertiveness of the oil-and-gas world after his Inauguration this year.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Describing, for instance, his understanding of climate science (invented arguably in its modern form in the United States, whose scientists first tracked the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and then built the computer models allowing us to predict our fate), Donald Trump said, “It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties, they said, Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said, Global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” Then, with regard to modern environmentalism, one of America’s greatest contributions to the world—a consciousness that allowed our air and water to be cleaned up dramatically over recent decades—Trump said, “In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable.”
In service to his vision of the world, the President has spent the year undoing every environmental law he can find. The zeal of his lieutenants—Lee Zeldin, at the Environmental Protection Agency; the former fracking executive Christopher Wright, at the Department of Energy; and others—has been remarkable. They’ve unleashed oil drilling along the coasts, opened up vast new stretches of the interior for coal mining, scrapped laws that attempted to staunch the flow of methane from gas wells into the air. Here’s Wright, on climate science, “Like, it’s a real physical phenomenon. It’s worth understanding a little bit. But to call it a crisis and point to disasters and say that that’s climate change, that’s to say, I’m not going to do my homework.”
Indeed, he and his colleagues are working hard to make it impossible for anyone to do their homework. They’ve shut down NASA’s upper Manhattan Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where James Hansen and other scientists first documented our plight, proposed to shut down the satellites that watch the climate changing, and even planned, in next year’s budget, to shut down the monitoring stations at Mauna Loa and elsewhere which keep track of how much carbon is pouring into the atmosphere. It is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history. It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.
And yet, it’s at least possible that Trump and company’s assault on environmental norms is more shrill than confident. Because something else happened this year that gives at least some hope for the future: the remarkable rise in clean, renewable energy, which set every kind of record in 2025. In May, in a rush to get solar farms up before a subsidies-for-growth policy ended, China was installing an average of three gigawatts of solar capacity a day—the U.S. installed a total of twenty-one gigawatts in the first three quarters of this year. China, which is currently at the center of the renewable revolution, broke its own records with ease: after surpassing its 2030 targets in 2024, it set new targets for 2035 this year, including a renewable-electricity share exceeding thirty per cent. It’s not alone: India met a 2030 target early, too. As Reuters reported in July, fifty per cent of installed electric capacity in the world’s most populous country ran on something other than fossil fuels. That’s not the same thing as saying it generated half its power from the sun and wind, but India was definitely trending in the right direction: coal use dropped nearly three per cent in the first half of the year.
Similar transitions have been occurring almost everywhere: in November, the Energy Information Administration reported that California used seventeen per cent less natural gas to produce electricity than it had the year before. Pakistan, which has seen a rapid solar buildout in the past two years, reached an agreement with Qatar to divert twenty-four liquified natural-gas cargoes in 2026 after domestic demand fell—with Pakistan bearing the loss if Qatar sells the cargoes below contract price. They simply don’t need the imports anymore. All told, through September, we generated almost a third more energy from the sun this year than last.
All this flies in the face of Trump’s call for U.S. “energy dominance” from oil and gas. He’s tried, with some success, to build that dominance on the back of tariffs—when the E.U. and Japan agreed to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of liquefied natural gas, he cut their threatened tariff rates substantially, in what could be described only as a shakedown. He’s also done his best to wreck the prospects of clean energy, not only gutting President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to help America catch up with China’s green-tech lead, but also trying to halt work on nearly completed wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. Just weeks ago, he put the kibosh on what would have been America’s largest solar array, in Nevada. And he’s tried to take his case around the world, lecturing leaders about the folly of clean energy.
Here he is again, at the U.N., offering his definitive take on solar and wind power: “By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it’s actually energy. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies.” And this is how he summed up the situation: “And I’m really good at predicting things. . . . I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from this green-energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
Or maybe it’s America that’s in trouble. When historians look back at 2025, I think the story they will tell is that, in the course of just a few months, the U.S. voluntarily surrendered technological and economic primacy to its theoretical chief adversary in the course of just a few months. China’s green-energy exports this year, through July, were one and a half times the size of American oil and gas exports in the same period. From Belem, the view seemed fairly clear. As the Times put it, “Countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are leapfrogging over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, plans to build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant. Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years.”
Crucial to this global shift was China, which was selling the technology and often providing the financing. “Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of the time,” the Chinese Vice-Premier, Ding Xuexiang, told the COP 30 delegates. “We need to stay confident, balance such goals as environmental protection, economic development, job creation, and poverty eradication.” China is far from a benign world power, but countries that buy green tech from it will not depend on it going forward, as they would depend on a supplier of gas or coal. Instead, they’ll depend on the sun, which has an enviable record of rising most mornings.
Americans, too, are starting to worry about the domestic effects of relying on fossil fuels. Electricity prices are spiking around the country, up ten per cent as the Trump Administration simultaneously green-lights the endless expansion of juice-sucking data centers and constricts the supply of the cheapest forms of energy. Election results from last month—especially in New Jersey, where the victorious Democrat in the gubernatorial race, Mikie Sherrill, made a strong commitment to renewable power—suggest that voters have woken up to this economic reality. Expect Sherrill’s colleagues across the country to start making much of the new data indicating that some of the states with the lowest power rates, such as Iowa and North Dakota, can often be those with the most wind, sun, and hydropower.
None of this is happening fast enough. But there’s definitely a wild card in what has often seemed like a stacked deck, and it’s increasingly coming into play. Another year will give us a sense of how much the game has been changed. ♦
